“Huk!”

I jolted upright, struck by the unsettling sensation of my head flying off my neck.

The floor where I had been lying was covered in dust. Every window was draped with curtains, blocking out every trace of light. As I scanned my surroundings, the familiar layout of the room slowly came into focus, and I could hardly trust my own eyes.

‘This place is……’

This was the room where I had been locked up whenever my half-brother Norman placed me under house arrest, using punishment as his excuse. The frigid air and the neglected state of the room, left to rot like an abandoned house, made it the only decrepit and eerie space in the entire Grand Ducal Household.

Before me stood a large full-length mirror, buried under a thick coat of pale dust. When I wiped the dust away, a cough escaped me on its own. Absentmindedly, I reached up to touch my neck.

‘Wait. My neck?’

Something felt off. My head and neck were still attached, perfectly intact. My fingers found no scar. Even now, the ghastly sensation of the guillotine blade severing my neck remained vivid……

Only then did I turn my eyes to the mirror I had just wiped clean. The moment I took in my own reflection, the shock hit me like a hammer to the head.

“This is what I looked like in the past……”

Long, dull silver hair reached down to my waist. My blue eyes, once bright and shimmering like the sea, had sunk deep into themselves, evoking the pitch-black depths of the ocean floor.

My pale skin had gone ghostly white, clearly starved of sunlight for quite some time. My face held no trace of vitality, and my body was gaunt, as though I had not eaten in days. I looked so wretched that no one would ever believe I was the daughter of the Aedis family.

I knew this appearance all too well. This was not the radiant twenty-five-year-old me who had stood above the empire’s people as High Priestess. This was my younger self, abused and neglected in the Grand Ducal Household. A fierce, crushing pain erupted in my chest.

“Huk!”

An enormous surge of magical energy stirred inside my body. My frail body groaned, on the verge of shattering under the weight of that power.

‘I lost all my magic. How is this possible?’

As a test, I conjured a mana crystal in the palm of my hand. It formed with ease, radiating a pure white light without a single blemish. That untainted magic proved that I still carried the Aedis bloodline’s power.

The amount of magic one possesses is fixed at birth, and once manifested, it does not change. Yet the magic in this body now surpassed even what I had wielded during my days as High Priestess. The sheer volume of it was overwhelming.

‘Have I actually regressed to the past?’

I had come across the word “regression” a handful of times in ancient texts, but I had never heard of it actually happening, not in any record or rumor. Something I had always dismissed as a ridiculous legend had now fallen upon me, and I could not even process it as real.

Faced with this impossible situation, I slapped myself across the cheek several times. But the sharp, stinging pain only made it more certain that this was real.

While I was still reeling, the noise outside grew unusually loud. Hoping to find some kind of clue, I scrambled to my feet.

The sudden movement sent my head spinning, and I stumbled and caught myself over and over again. I barely managed to drag myself to the window and pull back the heavy curtains. Blinding light flooded into the attic.

Through the attic window, the entrance to the Grand Ducal Household came into full view. A carriage bearing the crest of the Keadifar imperial family had stopped at the entrance. The servants, lined up in a row, all bowed their heads in unison toward whoever stepped out of the carriage.

I squinted, trying to make out the figure descending from the carriage. The moment I recognized who it was, goosebumps erupted across my entire body.

This was impossible.

“Arbo……?”

Arbo, who had met his death at my hands, stood there very much alive, his face far younger than I remembered. He wore a navy cloak over a black uniform, but the fabric did little to conceal his solid, powerful frame. Arbo wore an expression stronger than anyone I had ever known.

And behind Arbo stepped down my father, the former High Priest of the Keadi Empire. Father had passed away the year I turned twenty. He was not someone who should have been standing before my eyes, alive.

“Really, truly, I regressed to the past?”

I gripped the windowsill and swayed. My legs trembled violently from the shock.

I had committed sins that warranted God dragging me down to hell personally to deliver punishment. Even if it had not been by my own will, I had killed the innocent Arbo. So why had God seen fit to grant me a second life?

I was staring outside, wrapped in terror and dread, when Arbo suddenly lifted his gaze directly toward the attic where I stood. Our eyes met across the open air. Arbo’s violet eyes, the color of amethyst, fixed on me with a piercing stare.

“Rachie……”

The moment I met Arbo’s eyes, the image of him dying while looking at me surfaced, and guilt churned my stomach.

That day had been the first time I ever reached out to Arbo and proposed a meeting myself.

“You are saying you wish to share tea with me…… rather than with His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince?”

Caught off guard by the sudden proposal, Arbo’s eyes went wide like a startled rabbit’s, and he quickly turned his head away. I could not see his expression from that angle, but I remembered his ears, flushed redder than usual.

“Does this request put you in a difficult position?”

At the time, Mecato’s forced brainwashing through the Blood Pact had left my mind far from whole. I made the request of Arbo knowing full well it was unreasonable. A small, faint part of my reason was hoping Arbo would refuse. That was the only way he could have survived.

“No. It is not that. I am glad.”

But Arbo, contrary to what my reason had hoped, accepted my request without hesitation. His voice, when he said he was glad at my invitation, carried what seemed like a faint, shy tremor.

Had Arbo ever been that honest with me about his feelings again after that moment? His answer, that he was glad, circled in my ears like a persistent ringing.

I fled from Arbo’s gaze and drew the curtain shut. From below came the voices of the servants welcoming Arbo and my father.

I pressed my ear to the door and listened. I caught words of congratulation for returning safely from the war.

‘A war? Could they mean the war with the Kingdom of Winshow?’

The only war my father had participated in during my lifetime was the war against the Kingdom of Winshow. The Keadi Empire’s refusal to send mage mercenaries to other nations, in order to prevent the loss of magical talent, had been the cause of that war.

Father and Arbo had fought in the war against the Kingdom of Winshow and returned in triumph. Arbo’s contribution, in particular, had been immense. He swept across the battlefield with movements that seemed almost divine, and returned not as the pitiful illegitimate prince he had been labeled, but as a war hero.

‘Then that means I am nineteen right now.’

At nineteen, it had been just over a year since I entered the Grand Ducal Household. After Father enrolled me into the household at eighteen by his own order, my life had been anything but smooth. Life in the Grand Ducal Household was pure darkness, so much so that the time I had spent in the countryside with my mother was actually better by comparison.

If I had truly regressed with my memories intact, I had no time to sit here powerlessly. I needed to grasp my current situation immediately and form a plan for the future.

The first thing that came to mind was, naturally, Mecato Basil Keadifar. My lover. The one who sent me to the guillotine. I clenched my fist as I recalled Mecato’s vile smile, the one I had faced just minutes ago.

‘He used the Blood Pact to manipulate me into killing Arbo. That bastard.’

Mecato harbored a vicious inferiority complex toward Arbo, his own half-brother. Mecato had shuddered under the weight of his inadequacy compared to Arbo his entire life, and he decided on Arbo’s death with terrifying ease.

When he manipulated me into killing Arbo, he was smiling. Like the joy of it was driving him mad. Thinking of that skin-crawling smile brought Sati, his affair partner, to mind.

Sati Mercion was the second princess of the Kingdom of Winshow, the Keadi Empire’s neighbor. Sati was skilled at deceiving everyone with an innocent face. But inside her, uncontrollable ambition and a hunger for advancement ran rampant. As the second princess of the Kingdom of Winshow, the power she could claim there was limited by the circumstances of her birth.

Sati’s future had essentially been decided for her already. She would be sold off to some prominent noble family to serve as a tool for consolidating the Kingdom of Winshow’s power. That was the future laid out for Sati.

Sati did not want that future. She wanted to claim the highest position a woman could reach on her own terms. That position was the Empress of the Keadi Empire. To obtain that seat, she used herself as a tool for a peace agreement.

The engagement between Arbo and Sati had been arranged to cement the alliance between the Keadi Empire and the Kingdom of Winshow through marriage. But Arbo was, in the end, nothing more than a prince ranked below Mecato, and he could never become Emperor. So Sati began to seduce Mecato, who had been my lover.

The only method she had to win Mecato’s favor was black magic, which the law had forbidden. Sati used black magic to manifest even a trace of her meager magical ability, and through that, she won Mecato’s favor.

The last person who came to mind was Arbo Rovas Keadifar, who was now here at the Grand Ducal Household. When I recalled the violet eyes I had met just a short while ago, my heart, which had been dead, lurched back to life with a violent thud. It was the guilt-born weight of remorse and unease.